2022
5′ 13″
This short film has emerged from Xavi Bou’s artistic residence with the UCLouvain university in Belgium within the Reveal Flight project. Xavi Bou raised the project with this almost science-fiction question; Will all the birds in the world be counted one day?
The trend in our society is towards having more data and monitoring any parameter that is useful to it, including wildlife. Xavi Bou wonders if in the future it will reach the point of having every living being on this planet registered.
To show this paradigm, the author proposed to the university to generate a model that would allow identifying the birds that appear in his videos.
To do this, he used an artificial intelligence model that, from a bird database, “learned” to recognize what a bird is in flight. The model was able to detect the position of the bird’s body and define it within a rectangle. It was decided to count the individuals that appeared on the screen and add the coordinates within it.
The speech that we hear in the short comes from a text that arises from asking the question: Will it be possible to count all the birds in the world one day? To a text generator model by artificial intelligence.
The answers have been voiced by another model that generates voice from these texts. Because we are at an early stage in the field of Artificial Intelligence, mistakes are very common, sometimes even naive.
The errors that appear when detecting the birds, as well as the speeches, which although they seem convincing, are not endowed with any sense, give them almost human peculiarities, generating an atmosphere of strangeness when observing the result.
2021
4′ 16″
Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
This beautiful concept is the title of my new short film, created with real footage of flocks of starlings in flight.
Like in my last short film “Murmurations”, I focus on the amazing flights of starlings, though this time I highlight each individual and their complex relationship with the flock by playing with perception in two ways: by inverting the footage and slowing it down.
The soundtrack was also created by slowing down real bird calls between 10 and 20 times. The bird calls come from different species like the Common Nightingale, the Tawny Owl, and the Starlings themselves.
These complex flights, which appear to be orchestrated by superior intelligence, are actually the result of each bird following a few very simple rules to guide their movements.
This not only occurs between birds but also between the cells of a muscle, in the creation of a snowflake and the way a virus spreads. This is Emergence.
MURMURATIONS
2020
2′ 36″
In winter, starlings join in flocks of thousands of individuals to try to confuse the hawks that attack them, doing a mesmerizing dance.
This video is part of the Ornitografias project, a project in which Xavi Bou has been working for years, which consists in visualizing the beauty of bird flight paths.
ORNITHOGRAPHIES
2016
3′ 16″
Ornithographies arises from concern for capturing those unnoticed moments and from the interest in questioning the limits of human perception.
This project focuses on birds, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible. Is a balance between art and science; a nature-based dissemination project and a visual poetry exercise but above all, an invitation to perceive the world with the same curious and innocent look of the child we once were.
The sound of the video are the result to interpret the wave form of some birds that appears in it.
